The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason.
—Blaise Pascal
Time stretched out like the first long summer away from home at camp. Every hour seemed a day, every day a week, every week a new adventure. Girija and I were staying in a rest house, a dharamshala, provided free to religious pilgrims by a merchant family from Jaipur. Every morning we walked about a mile to Maharaji’s ashram in Vrindavan. The languid daily routine had at first repelled me, then captivated me, then bored me. I tried to find my niche, something to keep me learning and going deeper. I redoubled my efforts to find meaning and joy in the hypnotic devotional chanting and singing. I could not tell whether I was feeling equanimity, or just tranquilized, sitting around swatting flies.
Like everyone else, I was almost always sick. The water in Vrindavan is notoriously contaminated. Indians would tell us Westerners that we would get used to it, and that may have been true for digestive troubles caused by E. coli, but not for parasites and worms. I handed out the antibiotic Flagyl each day like it was candy. Maharaji would always remind us that suffering can make us closer to God. I wanted to be closer to God, but not to amoebas.
Nothing at all happened after Maharaji proclaimed that I would go to villages and give vaccinations. Nothing at all was mentioned about becoming a UN doctor. It seemed that the far-fetched idea was dropped. Perhaps it was a dead end. I did not mind, really. Well, maybe a little bit. It was such an unrealistic, magnificent idea. Working on a UN team that might eradicate a disease was out of my league. Maharaji had a reputation for predicting the future. There was a story I heard many times about the 1962 Chinese incursion on the Indian border. It was said that Indira Gandhi, as president of the Indian National Congress at the time, consulted with Maharaji on a course of action. He told her to do nothing, to wait, and that the Chinese would go away of their own accord. Just as Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was considering a counterattack, much of the Chinese army turned around and went home. No one ever knew why. Maharaji was known in India as having the spiritual power, or siddhi, for predicting the future, so I was embarrassed that he’d made a prediction about me that seemed like it would not come true.
We settled into the routine of Vrindavan, which was much like that in Kainchi, the chanting of morning prayers followed by darshan. At midday, when Maharaji went into his room, the Westerners read as much as we could—from the Ramayana, the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, the Gita, the Koran, biographies of saints and mystics and gurus.
Girija and I resumed our studies together of the Hindi language and history of Hinduism. The Vishnu tradition is the source of two sacred books, perhaps the greatest books in Indian literature, the Ramayana, or spiritual journey of Ram, and one of the longest epic poems in the world the Mahabharata—or The Great Epic of Bharat (India), which is much about Krishna, another incarnation of Vishnu. Since Vrindavan was where the historical Krishna had lived, we paid special attention to the chapter in the Mahabharata known as the “Song of God,” or the Song of Krishna. This part is known to most of us in America as the Bhagavad Gita.
The sweetest activity, however, was doing our daily parikrama, the meditative circumambulation of Vrindavan’s hundreds of ancient temples, most of which were devoted to Krishna or Krishna’s consort, Radha. Vrindavan is sacred in India because it was the town in which the young Krishna, the dusky-colored (sham) avatar of Vishnu, cavorted with his lovers, the milkmaids, and Radha, his consort. Despite his erotic frolicking with so many milkmaids, Krishna and Radha were seen as a divine pair. The mixing of generalized eroticism with a lifelong fidelity may have made some orthodox Brahmins uncomfortable, but it made sense to American hippies. We loved yelling out the local greeting “Radhe sham!” which meant something like “Hail to Krishna-and-Radha.” It was like saying “good morning,” “good evening,” “hello,” and “goodbye” all rolled into one—just as Radha and Krishna were also rolled into one.
Vrindavan was becoming the center of Krishna worship, housing the global headquarters of the Hare Krishna movement and making it an unlikely place for a temple to the monkey god Hanuman. The Hindu pantheon can be daunting, but differences were not a problem for Maharaji, with his common phrase sub ek attesting that all gods are one, all religions are one. He built his temple in Vrindavan on a side street called Hanuman Nagar, or “Monkey God City.”
One of Maharaji’s closest devotees, Dada Mukerjee, a Bengali professor of economics from Allahabad University, had come back to the ashram from his teaching job. While he was in Vrindavan, he translated for Maharaji. One night, right before sunset, Girija and I set out to our rooms. Cows meandered in the stillness of dusk. Monkeys scampered around the temple, and bells rang in nearby shrines. Like a call to prayer amidst this pastoral scene, Maharaji bellowed, “Doctor America! Doctor America!” I thought someone might be hurt, so Girija and I rushed to the back of the ashram where Maharaji was sitting. “Have you got your job at WHO yet?” he asked in Hindi as we approached.
“No, Maharaji,” I answered.
Then he asked Dada to translate: “You will go to work for the United Nations. God is going to give humanity a gift. The terrible disease, smallpox, will be pulled out by the roots. You will see. You will see.”
Dada emphasized, “Pulled out by the roots.” Then he added: “There are two different ways of saying in Hindi that a disease will be conquered. Katam karna means to simply end it, while the expression Maharaji used, unmulan, means to uproot it. Muli means radish, and it is the Sanskrit word for root.” It was the same in English. Radic, in eradicate, like the word radish, also means root.
I murmured something and hoped he would drop the subject again. Girija and I joined the cows walking home toward our dharamshala, still confused.
Because the ashram was so close to the Taj Mahal, it was often filled with Indian tourists in addition to Indian devotees and a dozen or two Westerners. Some days, Maharaji would receive political leaders, like Shankar Dayal Sharma, then head of the Indian National Congress, and later president of India; or Akbar Ali Khan, governor of the state of Uttar Pradesh. Maharaji would then hide us elsewhere in the town so they wouldn’t notice that many of us had overstayed our visas. Sometimes he’d send us to visit the Taj or make a pilgrimage someplace else in India.
When the president of India was coming, he sent us all to Kausani in the Himalayas, where Mahatma Gandhi had gone on retreat to contemplate his plan to win independence for India. There, Gandhi had made his own translation of the Bhagavad Gita into English. Girija and I stayed near the site, reading Gandhi’s translation in the same place it was generated. His version is a powerful guidebook for living a life that combines a spiritual path with social activism.
Since Girija and I had been in India for more than the six months permitted by our tourist visas, it was time to face the visa renewal dance. We went off to the district magistrate’s office in Mathura to ask for a visa extension. Our first request was denied and a deportation order, called a Quit India notice, was stapled to our passports.
I typed a long appeal to the district magistrate, about being a Western physician in love with India, reading the Bhagavad Gita, living in the ashram in the very town where Krishna had grown up. I peppered my letter with Sanskrit phrases and flowery couplets in the local Brijbassi dialect to show off my knowledge. “Please let me appear in person and make the case for me and my wife, who has taken the Indian name of Girija, to request a visa extension.” Eventually, we were granted an appointment to appear in person before the magistrate. To further impress, I wore a white dhoti, the same type Gandhi had worn to meet the king of England at Buckingham Palace. Gandhi was later asked, “Didn’t you feel rather underdressed wearing only that loincloth in the presence of the king?” Gandhi replied, “His majesty was wearing sufficient clothes for both of us.”
Dressing that morning, I wound the dhoti carefully under and between my legs and then tucked the end into the waistband to secure it, making sure it covered my lower body. Fifty or more Indian supplicants—young and old, men and women—waited for the magistrate to settle matters of landownership and government subsidies. Girija and I were the only Westerners. After several hours of waiting and pacing, the magistrate called out. “Lorrie?” he said, like the British word Indians use for “truck.” Realizing he meant “Larry,” I leaped out of my seat, catching my dhoti on a nail protruding from the bench. It immediately unwound and plunged to my ankles, leaving me bare-assed in public.
There was an audible gasp from the Indians around us, a moment of awkward silence, and then laughter. The district magistrate, dressed in a proper English suit, turned away out of modesty, waited while Girija helped me cover my nakedness, and then said the Hindi equivalent of, “Nice try. I would give you an A for effort if you had not embarrassed everyone. You had better learn how to tie that thing before you come here again—or go anywhere else in India.” But he also stamped both of our visas with the six-month extension. The embarrassment was a small price to pay.
A week or two passed uneventfully as we celebrated being able to stay another half year in the ashram. But then Maharaji started up again, asking me every day, “Did you get your UN job yet? Has Doctor America become UNO doctor yet?” During darshan, if I sat to meditate while he engaged with others, he would giggle and continue to throw apples or oranges at me, his aim improving every day.
Maharaji rarely said “do this” or “do that” or indicate that one thing was right or another wrong. He taught by parable or by having us focus on a verse from the Gita. “See how Krishna tells Arjuna that not even God can take time off and not work,” he would say. “God must be in the world. You must be in the world, not hiding away in a cave. Work to help relieve suffering, but don’t get a big head.” I took this to mean that I wasn’t good enough for spiritual development through meditation, or dhyana yoga. I did not understand that Maharaji was teaching me about another form of yoga, karma yoga, working to be one with God through work in the world.
“Wake up, wake up,” he would say in a high-pitched staccato. “Meditation, devotion, and worship are all good. Very, very good. Do these upaya—these methods. But for you, not only meditation or devotion or asanas [postures]. Your yoga is nish kam karma yoga. You will do service, but avoid praise, and give the fruits of your labor to God. Don’t get excited about your role. That is your dharma. Your path is working in the world, not in meditation. You will find your dharma when you get your UN job. Don’t get a big head.”
Weeks passed and I remained as puzzled as ever. Then one day, Maharaji shouted across the courtyard, “Doctor America. Now! Go to Delhi. Go to WHO. You’ll get your job. Girija, go with the doctor. Today. Right now!”
Girija and I took a pedal rickshaw from Vrindavan ashram to the Mathura train station, where we boarded a train to Delhi. We asked the station attendant when we arrived two or three hours later where the WHO office was located. “Indraprastha Estate,” he said. We jumped in a taxi, yelling at the driver, “WHO, the UN building in Indraprastha.” A few minutes later, we arrived at the WHO office, a five-story pastel blue structure everyone called SEARO, for South East Asia Regional Office.
I was still wearing my homespun kurta and Girija her sari. We walked to the entrance, and the chowkidor, the guard, asked us to wait in the reception area. The receptionist, a fifty-something Anglo-Indian woman named Mrs. Edna Boyer, took her seat and asked me to approach the counter. She was wearing a dress, not a sari; she wore lipstick, had plucked and penciled eyebrows, and a wide open face framed by a short haircut. She was one of the few modern-looking Indian women I had ever seen.
I began with what would become my regular spiel: “Hello. I’m here to get a job with the World Health Organization. My guru, Neem Karoli Baba, who lives in the Himalayas, said I would work with WHO and go to villages to give vaccinations for smallpox. Smallpox will be eradicated, because of God’s gift to humanity and the effort of dedicated health workers.”
I will never forget the expression on Mrs. Boyer’s face. There was not a hint of cynicism, just pure delight. Years later she confessed that a long-haired kurta-wearing hippie was a breath of fresh air for her, a welcome relief from the parade of stiff diplomats and unhappy local contractors with whom she usually dealt every day. Without hesitation, she went into the back room and returned with UN application forms. I filled them out as best I could. I had to leave blank the section where I was supposed to list all of my scientific publications. I struggled to deal with the requirement of a reference from “an internationally renowned physician not from your own country.” I couldn’t use Ben Spock. Maybe the English neurologist and poet Dr. Martin Bax, who had been my summer preceptor at Guy’s Hospital in London, but I had to approximate his address. Mrs. Boyer asked me to come back the following week to meet with the WHO personnel officer, Mr. Katri.†
Katri was from Lucknow, the capital of the state of Uttar Pradesh and the city of one of Maharaji’s most famous temples. Every Tuesday, the day dedicated to Hanuman, students at Lucknow University would come to the temple, usually to pray for good grades. Katri had been one of those students. Though he knew of Neem Karoli Baba, he did not buy my story. He told me I looked like a crazy hippie who had wandered off a movie set. In fact, he told me I looked exactly like one particular crazy hippie in one particular Bollywood movie, Hare Rama Hare Krishna. Which, in fact, was true.
When the Hog Farm buses had been parked outside Kathmandu, the Indian filmmaker Dev Anand was filming his latest project there, a Bollywood movie about hippies. He wanted to cast the colorful Hog Farm hippies as extras in the movie, which he described as a film about the deep spiritual quest that brought the stream of young Westerners to India. For our services, he offered us each twelve rupees, or about twenty-five cents, per day plus all the hash we could smoke, which he hoped we would do in front of the cameras. About a dozen of us, including Wavy, Bonnie Jean, Girija, and me, were extras for a couple of days. The film became a cult sensation in India; the only problem was that instead of a film about our coming to India to search for God, Dev Anand sensationalized the hippie lifestyle of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, painting us as every Indian family’s nightmare. For the next decade, whenever any of us walked through a village or met someone for the first time in India, they were likely to break out into the movie’s theme song, “Dum Maro Dum” (“Puff After Puff”), about smoking hashish from morning to night. Sometimes it was cool to be recognized, but sometimes that song, which was a huge hit, came back to haunt me.
Thankfully, Katri didn’t break into song, but he didn’t give me a job either. WHO had no openings, he explained. The organization hired only expert consultants from medical schools and academic institutions outside of India. That was the rule. They had never hired an American who was in India on a tourist visa. WHO would hire experts only from a learned academy such as the National Institutes of Health or the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), not from some Monkey Temple in the mountains that proper modern Indians didn’t even go to anymore. To further complicate matters, I was younger by at least a decade than any foreigner SEARO had ever hired.
At Maharaji’s insistence, however, I kept going back to WHO, more than a dozen times by taxi, bus, rickshaw, and train. Mrs. Boyer and Katri always treated me kindly, registering only mild irritation whenever I appeared at the doorstep bucked up by Maharaji’s confidence and his prediction.
On my ninth or tenth visit, Katri softened and changed the subject. “Bearing in mind that hiring you is quite impossible,” he said, “and confused as I am as to why you want to work for WHO, there is one important program that, if they could ever get it going, they would have to staff up quickly in order to achieve their goal.”
“Which program is that?” I asked.
“It’s the smallpox program,” he answered.
A gentle, familiar buzz went through me.
“The Government of India,” Katri continued, “is adamantly against expanding the WHO program to fight smallpox. India has bigger problems, such as malaria, infant mortality, even diarrhea. Each of them kills many more children every year than does smallpox. And then there is Prime Minister Gandhi’s major priority: family planning. Smallpox may be the top priority of other countries, but it is not India’s priority at all. There are WHO smallpox programs in twenty other countries, but there is no such program just for India, not really. There is one valiant French woman doctor, Dr. Grasset, who works with missionary zeal, in charge of smallpox for the SEARO region, but even she has trouble getting permission to go to the remote areas of India. You can meet her. It won’t do any good, but if you come back next week I’ll take you to see her. She is also the only lady doctor here in WHO.”
After the conversation with Katri I began to realize I needed to look a lot more presentable. Maharaji’s devotees in Delhi, the Barmans, graciously lent me a suit. It did not fit well, but it was an improvement over the ashram clothes. To complete the look, which felt like a disguise, I bought a terrible-looking tie, pulled my hair back into a ponytail, and tucked it into the collar of my white shirt.
Dr. Nicole Grasset was an urbane, elegant, and charming French-Swiss epidemiologist, sometimes called the “Hurricane on High Heels” because of her fashionable style and irrepressible spirit. She was a public health hero from her time in Africa when she left her job at the Pasteur Institute to violate no-fly zones in order to take vaccines to people who needed them during the war in Biafra. She was kind but quick to disabuse me of any hope that she would even read my application. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We really don’t have a job for anyone like you.”
By this time, Maharaji had moved back to Kainchi. When I returned, he asked, “Did you get your job?”
“No, Maharaji. I’m not going to get this job.”
But I kept going back anyway, every time he asked me. Trips to Delhi from Kainchi were grueling, a dozen hours if everything went right. Trains were late or canceled regularly; bus rides on mountain roads were terrifying. Delhi was an obstacle course of beggars, with the craziest drivers in existence and cows and other animals wandering the streets. It would have been great if Maharaji could have sent me there just once, on the right day to see the right person so I could land the job.
But mystical traditions are filled with stories of teachers testing and training and sometimes tormenting their students. A classic example is the story of Milarepa, the eleventh-century Tibetan saint Wavy had told us about who subsisted on nettles during meditation. Milarepa had been a robber and a murderer, so his teacher, Marpa, made him build and tear down tower after tower—a humiliating process that lasted years but would purify the obstacles to spiritual development, that is, Milarepa’s inner stew of rage, violence, and revenge. I am not Milarepa and I am not a saint, but walking into the WHO office over and over again and explaining that my guru had told me to come work for them might have altered my biochemistry. I think Maharaji wanted me to gain nonattachment to success. A spiritual apprenticeship can be confusing, even counterintuitive. Those long, exhausting trips, constant rejections, and the daily reminder of my unworthiness, the roller coaster of doubt and the balm of Maharaji’s reassurance, were all part of the preparation. What developed in me during that time was faith—delicate, wavering, tenuous, but faith nonetheless.
Sometimes people say that faith is the opposite of doubt, but I don’t think that is true. To me, the opposite of faith is rigid certainty. Doubt is the constant companion of true faith; like God, it is more verb than noun. Faith is the ride, not the station, as Indians describe it. No one can avoid doubt, skepticism, fear, and uncertainty on the journey to faith if they are honest with themselves. Obstacles are the training ground.
“Go back to WHO,” Maharaji said again.
So I took the twelve-hour trip back to Delhi.
Dr. Grasset let me down as gently as possible. “No, I’m sorry, there is no job available. I know your teacher said you would work here, but I can’t help you right now. We will keep you in mind.”
“Did you get your job?” Maharaji asked as soon as I returned.
“No, I didn’t.”
“See the French doctor again.” This routine was getting embarrassing.
This time, I skipped the taxi-bus-rickshaw-train trip and phoned Dr. Grasset from Nainital. I had to book the call a day or two in advance from the county post, telegraph, and telephone office. The connection crackled as she explained that there was no expansion of the smallpox program and no possibility of hiring American doctors, but she thanked me politely for my continued interest in the work.
Days passed. At morning darshan one day Maharaji sat up straight and commanded, “Immediately! Go to WHO!”
I jumped on the train to Delhi reluctantly, unhappy to leave the ashram. I waved to Mrs. Boyer when I entered. She was talking to an American man I had never seen there before.
“Oh, let me introduce you to a fellow American,” she said to me.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
Here we go again. I recited my story: “I’ve come to WHO to work for the smallpox program. My guru, who lives in the Himalayas, told me I would work for WHO.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“Yes. I just finished my internship in San Francisco.”
He smiled and left the room, and I talked with Mrs. Boyer.
Dr. Grasset did not answer the phone when I called from Mrs. Boyer’s desk, but Mrs. Boyer suggested I be patient and wait. After a while, Dr. Grasset called back and said there was still no expansion of the smallpox program, but the chief of the global smallpox program, D. A. Henderson, was there from Geneva, Switzerland. “He is upstairs here with me. Why don’t you come and meet him?”
Henderson turned out to be the man I had met in reception. He confirmed that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had still not given WHO permission to bring a team of medical officers into India for smallpox eradication. This was the purpose of his visit, and he was hoping to have a meeting with her the next day. At Dr. Grasset’s insistence he agreed to interview me and wrote a note for the record that I found years later when he asked me to return to India to close down the smallpox program: “This young man says he is a doctor, and he seems to like foreign cultures and might do very good international work someday. But he appears to have ‘gone native.’ And he has no experience in public health, no training past internship. Although I wish him good luck in the future, we have no job for him.”
“Listen. We can’t hire you,” he said. “For starters, you have no training in epidemiology.”
He was right. And I had never even seen a case of smallpox.
“Second, the Indian government doesn’t want Americans working here,” he said. In fact, the government had been kicking Americans out after India accepted Soviet aid to go to war with the United States–backed Pakistan. I don’t remember whether it was before or after I started at WHO, but there was talk of the Indian government kicking out of India all workers of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) after the organization, in a brazen act of arrogance, released millions of irradiated male mosquitoes without the permission of the Indian government. The intention was understandable, even admirable. They were trying to figure out a way to sterilize mosquitoes in an attempt to eradicate the vector that carried malaria, but doing this as if India were the organization’s own private lab was such a naked act of neocolonialism that the Indian parliament convened a special meeting and nearly tossed out both the malaria and the unrelated smallpox eradication programs in protest.
“And third,” Henderson said, “we are not ready to fully launch a program in India. We all know that India will be the most difficult place to work; this is where we expect to see smallpox make its last stand. India may wind up being the last place on earth that has smallpox. We will need to finish the eradication process in other countries first, then redeploy all our resources here in order to wipe smallpox from the world.”
I returned to the ashram disheartened, and when Maharaji asked how it went, I reported dutifully about meeting Dr. Henderson and what seemed like a final “no.”
“Call the lady doctor again!”
I telephoned WHO with great hesitation.
Dr. Grasset was gracious and amused as always. “Dr. Henderson has not met with the prime minister yet about the status of the smallpox program. If there is any change I will telephone you, but it is unlikely.”
Girija and I had had very little contact with our families since arriving in India with our orange backpacks. Girija’s mother, Ann Feldman, was the only family member on either side who traveled abroad. The daughter of Russian immigrants, Ann was born in Detroit in 1916. Her parents, like my grandfather Louis Brilliant, died in the great influenza pandemic of 1917–1918, leaving Ann in the hands of her five older brothers. I had never known her to be anything other than unhappy. We hoped seeing our life in India would change how she saw things, so I bought her a plane ticket to visit from Detroit. We got a telegram confirming the date Ann would arrive in New Delhi.
“Maharaji, we are leaving tomorrow, Tuesday, to pick up my mother at the Delhi airport,” Girija said.
“Day after tomorrow, Wednesday,” he replied without missing a beat.
“No—it is tomorrow, Tuesday,” I countered, thinking he misunderstood. I had bought the ticket; I knew when Ann was coming.
“Day after tomorrow. Wednesday.”
“We saw the telegram. It’s Tuesday.”
“She will be here Wednesday.” And he laughed and giggled.
Certain we were right about the day of her arrival, we left for Delhi. But there was no Ann at the airport. When we got back to Vrindavan, another telegram had arrived saying, “Plane delayed one day. Now arriving Wednesday.” Maharaji giggled.
Ann arrived safely, and after some sleep and sightseeing in the neighborhood, we got a car and took her to the Taj Mahal in Agra. When we thought she was getting used to the crowds and lack of sanitation, we drove to Vrindavan to meet Maharaji. It was only an hour away from Agra.
“I’m not going in there! I’m not going in! Take me back to Delhi! Get me out of here,” Ann screamed as she was surrounded by a half dozen children begging and clinging to her dress outside the ashram gates. “This place is filthy. I hate you and I hate your cult!”
I tried my best to persuade her to come in and meet our guru, but got nowhere. Ann got back in the car and locked the doors. She never did meet Maharaji. Instead, we took her for more sightseeing—first, to the spectacular city of Jaipur in Rajasthan State. After that, we visited the white Lake Palace in Udaipur, which looks like a dream castle floating on water. It was one pixel of the millions of exquisite pixels on the map of India.
The palace had become a luxury hotel, where we had booked rooms. Ann’s room was at the far end of the property. While she was moving into the room, we saw another Western woman, the only other Westerner, also checking into her room nearby. No. Not possible! Nicole Grasset was about to enter the room next door to my mother-in-law! This was just too much of a coincidence, the odds too great, but in my altered state in mystical India, it somehow made complete sense.
“Dr. Grasset! Nicole, it’s me! Larry Brilliant! I’m here too with my wife and mother-in-law. She’s staying in the room next door!”
“Oh, Larry, how remarkable to bump into you so far away from Delhi. It is nice to see you but please forgive me for not being social. This is my first vacation and my first day out of Delhi since coming to India and I only have one day. I am going to have a good rest,” she said. “Have a lovely vacation.”
After two months of running back and forth to Delhi’s WHO offices, Girija and I were exhausted. The coincidence of seeing Nicole next door to my mother-in-law was followed by an emotional letdown. That had been the closest we came to feeling that there was any chance that I would ever work for WHO.
Ann returned to the States, and we went back to Vrindavan. Maharaji had gone traveling; he had sent everyone away, and the satsang was moving about. Girija and I decided on a trek in the mountains in Kashmir. We stopped at the Barmans’ house in New Delhi and I used their phone to call Nicole at WHO and tell her of our plans.
“We will be in Kashmir. In case we happen to bump into you there I want you to know I’m not stalking you.” Nicole laughed. “And of course if by any chance a job comes through,” I said, “please call me in Srinagar.”
“You know,” she said, “a very strange thing happened last evening. I am not a person given to visions, and I am not a fan of gurus. But I had this feeling about you, about working with you, like a dream but it was not a dream. I don’t know—maybe it was bumping into you in Udaipur, maybe it’s your guru talking to me or something like that, which would of course be silly.” She laughed and added, “But one thought does occur to me. Can you write?”
I told her yes, and that I had edited several magazines. I thought it best not to mention at that moment how politically radical they were.
“Well, you know we can’t really hire you as a smallpox doctor, both because you have no experience and because the Government of India has not allowed us to have a full-scale program here, so thus far the entire program is just a Czech epidemiologist, me, and the Indian administrative assistants. But if you’re really that determined to work for WHO, I was thinking maybe I could hire you as an administrative assistant, a secretary on the SEARO payroll for local hires. I don’t think I need much approval to get that done. Would you be willing to type and file and answer phones? And of course your pay would be at the Indian level, not at the level of an international medical officer.”
“I’ll do anything!” I assured her.
The next day in the office, Nicole altered my application, switching it from “doctor” to “administrative assistant.” She sent a telegram to D. A. Henderson, who had returned to headquarters in Geneva: “I’m going to hire Brilliant as a secretary.”
Since D.A. had thought I had “gone native,” I can only imagine the expression on his face when Nicole’s telegram arrived. But one thing about him: D. A. Henderson was the most supportive boss and he was a great manager. If Nicole wanted to hire a crazy hippie kid to file and type, he would let her.
While all of this was going on, Girija and I floated on a houseboat on Dal Lake in Srinagar. It was a lovely, sweet reprieve from hustling for a job, a nice break from the daily prayers and satsang struggle as everyone jostled to get closest to Maharaji in the ashram. We exchanged the wakeup call from the kirtan wallahs, singing “Sri Ram, jai Ram,” for the sound of the muezzin calling Muslims to prayer five times a day echoing peacefully across Dal Lake.
We’d been visiting sacred sites to Shiva and hiking most days during our reprieve. The day we were leaving, we heaved on our backpacks and started to walk the couple of hours to Srinagar. Twenty minutes into the trek, we heard a series of wails coming from a wooden building by the valley side of the road. As we got closer, we saw it was a doctor’s office, shingle and all, saying “Dr. Ashraf Beg.”
“Allah akbar hai!” God is great! we heard a patient shout. Curious, we knocked on the office door. A young, clean-shaven Muslim doctor was surprised to find two Angrezis standing on the other side.
“I’m a doctor from California, living in India,” I began in a conflation of Hindi, English, and Urdu. “I heard the shouts and wondered whether everything was okay.”
“More than okay,” came the reply. “Come in, have some tea. Let me show you.” Dr. Beg was operating on people who had been blinded by cataracts, restoring their sight. “My patient was totally blind. He hadn’t seen his grandchildren in years.” His joy upon seeing again was the source of the cry we’d heard. Dr. Beg let me remove the bandages from another man, who also cried, “Allah akbar hai!,” thanking God for his gift of sight.
This was my first view close up of sight-restoring surgery. The procedure took only a few minutes, cost less than a meal in Srinigar or Delhi, and was easy to perform. It was breathtaking that something so debilitating, so dire as blindness could be conquered so quickly and cheaply and sustainably. As it would turn out, after smallpox, this easily reversible blindness that plagues so many in developing countries would be our target. For that, Girija and I helped establish the Seva Foundation less than a decade later.
Did you get your job yet?” Maharaji asked when we returned to Kainchi.
I told him that Nicole Grasset had come up with a way to hire me, “But it’s still complicated.”
“Go back to Delhi.” So it was back and forth again, like a yo-yo. I put on the Barmans’ suit and braced myself for more teasing and humiliation at SEARO.
But this time Mr. Katri, the personnel officer, called me in and closed the door behind me. “There is good news and bad news,” he said. The good news, the remarkable news, in fact, was that Nicole’s idea had worked and the application to be an administrative assistant had been approved. The bad news was that I would have to pass a U.S. government security clearance.
That was it. Probably the end of the road. There was no chance in the world that I could get a clearance. It was not so much a security clearance as a test of loyalty, required by only a few countries, Katri explained. President Harry Truman had signed an executive order creating the International Organizations Employees Loyalty Board to adjudicate the loyalty of Americans who wanted to work for the United Nations. The Loyalty Board had been abused during the McCarthy witch hunts and during the peak of the Cold War; it had become more active recently because of the protests over the war in Vietnam. Any American who wanted a position with the United Nations had to undergo a full field investigation by the FBI. They would visit every place I had lived in the United States and interview neighbors and family and friends for evidence of “un-American” speech or activity.
I had plenty of reason to worry. I had been detained with Dr. Martin Luther King; I was a member of a radical medical student organization and involved with the MCHR, many of whose founders had been summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Girija and I had joined another revolutionary group called the Venceremos Brigade and had signed up to pick sugarcane in Cuba, which we had naively conflated with opposing the war in Vietnam. Even though we never made it to Cuba because of the surgery to remove my parathyroid tumor, the mere fact that my name appeared on the list might be considered anti-American.
I returned to Kainchi feeling emotionally crushed. I tried to tell Maharaji that this fantasy ride was over.
“Oh,” he said as if there were not the slightest problem. “Who is the person who is supposed to give you this security clearance?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who is the American who gives you the job?”
I mentioned that D. A. Henderson was the boss. Maharaji sat up straight and held his blanketed arm up before his face.
“How do you spell his name?” he asked.
“H, E, N, D—” I started.
“Wait.” He repeated the letters slowly, in a deep voice. He peeked out at me through his fingers, like a psychic putting on a show at a dinner party, checking to make sure I was properly impressed, giggling with each new letter.
Girija and I were staying in the White House across the road from the Kainchi ashram. A few weeks later, we got to the temple early one morning and Maharaji called us into his “office.” He was being uncharacteristically hospitable. He had tea and sweets brought in and hugged us. We were rubbing his feet. It was blissful. I thought he was trying to make up for our disappointment over the loss of the WHO job.
“Okay. Time for you to go,” he said. We stood up, thinking he meant it was time for us to leave his room, time to leave the ashram and return to the White House. We bowed and walked out. But just as we approached the gate, the postman’s car pulled up to the front of the ashram, and he handed me a telegram: “We have been notified today by Dr. D. A. Henderson from WHO headquarters in Geneva that you have received U.S. clearance. Come immediately to WHO-SEARO office in New Delhi to begin work.”
My heart was racing. Girija was so happy. None of this made sense, but it did not need to. D. A. Henderson years later told me that around the time I was spelling out his name for Maharaji he had been attending a cocktail party at the American embassy in Geneva. The American ambassador and the U.S. surgeon general were there. The surgeon general asked Henderson how the smallpox eradication program was going.
“Great,” said Henderson. “We have thirty-four countries cleared and only four are left.”
“Are all the countries helping you?” asked the surgeon general.
“Yes. Russia’s given us vaccine. Canada too. Sweden’s given us a lot of money. Czechoslovakia is sending great epidemiologists. Many countries are helping.”
“What about America? What are we giving you?”
“Well,” said Henderson, “CDC is terrific with providing research, but otherwise the U.S. has not done so much.”
“What do you need?”
“I don’t know how I got into this, and I don’t know why we’re doing it, but my team in India wants to hire this young American doctor who has been living in an ashram in the mountains of India. They want to bring him on as a secretary and as a local hire, not a medical officer. We’ve never done anything like this before. But the kid was a hippie and war protestor and probably won’t get a loyalty clearance, or at least the background check will take too long.”
“Loyalty clearance? This doesn’t seem like a high enough position to require that. Get him a temporary clearance and then if you hire him later get the loyalty clearance. Who gives him the clearance?”
Henderson said, “Well, the approval letter comes to me from your office so I guess you can do it.”
“I can? Give me a napkin.” He took the napkin, got out his pen, and wrote, “Brilliant—okay to start work for temp job while waiting for clearance.” He gave the napkin to Henderson, who telegraphed WHO in New Delhi that I’d been cleared to work. Or at least that’s the story D.A. told me over and over again. I would never be able to find out if it was true or if he was pulling my leg.
At certain moments, the ordinary rules of cause and effect are suspended. Living in a sacred space, surrounded by sacred images, following a guru, a teacher, or a prophet who seems prescient and nudges you toward a specific path—impossible things happen. Since you cannot explain them through reason, you must acquiesce to unreasonable theories. After that, everything begins to make sense again, but in an unexpected way: all impossible things begin to seem quite possible after all.